Computers and mobile communications devices, for example cellular telephones, tablets, smartphones, smart watches and the like, have become a very popular means of accessing information sources and resources of all types for many daily activities, and for communicating with others for both business and personal purposes. In most populated regions, such digital devices provide individuals with virtually constant access to information and communications via the Internet.
Mobile telephones (also known as cellular telephones or smartphones) have the ability to connect to the internet either through a cellular network by conventional cellular technology, or through a local network utilizing ‘Wi-Fi’, and as such have become a particularly useful and widespread example of this. Mobile telephones are small enough to be easily carried virtually anywhere, and have evolved to provide myriad mobile device application programs or “apps” that allow users to perform various tasks in addition to telephony and connectivity to the Internet.
However, as a compromise in favour of mobility and ease of handling, mobile telephones suffer from the drawback that the display is very small. It is therefore not practical to use multiple apps simultaneously the way one can on a computer, where the display is large enough that windows generated by different applications can display data, interfaces etc. adjacent to other windows. The size of the display in a mobile telephone lends itself to displaying only one app's interface at a time. For the same reason, mobile telephones necessarily have very small keyboards for data entry, which makes typing difficult for many users. In many cases mobile telephones provide the keyboard as part of the touch-screen display, which further reduces the amount of display area available for app interfaces and data.
Because the keyboard is so small, any process that can reduce the amount of typing required by the user to perform a task is considered to be advantageous. It reduces both the time spent by the user performing tasks, and the user's frustration level with inevitable typographical errors attendant to the small size of the keyboard.
Also, because the display area is so small and is practically able to provide only one app's interface at a time for use by the user, any process that can facilitate toggling between the interfaces of different apps is advantageous.
It would accordingly be advantageous to equip a mobile device with a process that reduces the amount of typing required by the user, thus reducing the time taken to perform a task on the mobile device and opportunities for errors. It would further be advantageous to reduce or eliminate the steps required to toggle between different apps that are being used to perform related tasks.